Mar­tin Scorsese’s first fea­ture film Who’s That Knock­ing at My Door? was shot over the course of sev­eral years, and was orig­i­nally released in 1967 as I Call First. Its piece­meal ori­gins are betrayed by two dis­crete sequences: one recount­ing the mis­ad­ven­tures of a group of slacker friends in down­town New York, and a very dif­fer­ent, more char­ac­ter and dialogue-driven love story between J.R. (Kei­tel) and the unnamed “Girl on the Staten Island Ferry” (Zina Bethune).

Non-linear cross-cutting between the two adds up to more than the sum of their parts. J.R. is increas­ingly hes­i­tant to horse around with his gang­ster friends, a lifestyle involv­ing shak­ing down debtors, ter­ror­iz­ing each other with loaded pis­tols, and going uptown to get with — and then rob — gullible girls. His ret­i­cence is explained by a par­al­lel sequence in which he meets cute with The Girl. Sim­i­larly, their young courtship is given weight by the audience’s knowl­edge of what he’s done with his life so far, and how dras­tic a change he faces by con­sid­er­ing mar­ry­ing her.

The pas­sion of Har­vey Keitel

J.R. is much more sen­si­tive than his brutish chums to the splen­dor of nature and to the cathar­sis of cin­ema. His idea of seduc­ing a girl is to lec­ture her on Hol­ly­wood West­erns, John Ford’s The Searchers (1956) in par­tic­u­lar. His mod­els of mas­culin­ity come from the movies, espe­cially John Wayne and Lee Mar­vin, and he divides women into two cat­e­gories: broads and girls (which is another way of say­ing whores and madon­nas). The Girl is savvy enough to know what she’s get­ting into; she clearly catches his mean­ing when he slips and openly refers to her as a broad.

Another piece to the puz­zle was a sex mon­tage added in order to ensure dis­tri­b­u­tion. Scors­ese scores J.R.‘s fan­tasy of sex with a series of women to The Doors’ “The End”, later of course also to become a key ingre­di­ent to his peer Fran­cis Ford Coppola’s mas­ter­piece Apoc­a­lypse Now! (1979).

J.R. (Har­vey Kei­tel) knows how to romance Zina Bethune: “Let me tell you some­thing, that girl in that pic­ture was a broad”

Hold­ing every­thing together is a fram­ing device in the form of a flash­back to young J.R. being served food by his mother (Cather­ine Scors­ese, Scrosese’s own mother). It’s an obvi­ously happy mem­ory, but we learn that the core theme of the film is that J.R. is emo­tion­ally crip­pled by the Catholic guilt instilled by his fam­ily and upbring­ing. He is unable to con­sum­mate the rela­tion­ship with the girl he loves, and who loves him back. When he finds out she’s a vic­tim of rape, he alter­nates between not believ­ing the facts and blam­ing her. Even in the end, he sees her rape as some­thing he must for­give her for. The penul­ti­mate sequence is a mon­tage of Catholic iconog­ra­phy set to the title track by The Genies.

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